Boris Mikhailov - Dusk

21 febbraio - 5 aprile 2009, Otegem (Belgio)
With the show ‘Boris Mikhailov - Dusk’, Deweer Gallery is the first to introduce the work of Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov in Belgium. The gallery thus expands its collaboration with artists from eastern Europe. After Ilya and Emilia Kabakov and Sergey Bratkov, among others, the focus is now on an artist who is generally recognized as one of the most important and influential photographers from the former Soviet Union. Boris Mikhailov was born in Kharkov, Ukrainia in 1938. Unlike a lot of people from his generation like Ilya Kabakov and Eric Bulatov, who moved from Ukrainia to Moscow and then quite quickly emigrated to the West, Boris Mikhailov kept on living and working in the somewhat anonymous city of Kharkiv until well into the nineties. He was and still is attached to the vast and forgotten hinterland of the former Soviet Union; even though he now lives in Berlin, he regularly spends time in his native town. Mikhailov, who was trained as a technical engineer, started to make photographs around 1965. He lost his job in 1966 after the KGB discovered that he had taken nude pictures of his wife with a camera that belonged to his company, and subsequently started to work as an independent photographer. For years, he earned a living making enlargements and retouching snap shots and family pictures. His clients used them in their homes and hung the photographs on the walls like ersatz paintings. This generally accepted way of retouching photographs, a kind of photoshopping avant-la-le’ttre, gave people the feeling that the ‘truth’ of a photographical image could be freely manipulated, an approach that paralleled some practices of the communist regime of that moment. The same regime of that epoch also defined that photographers were not allowed to take pictures of strategically important locations, pictures taken from anything higher than the second floor of a building, pictures that were a treat to the Soviet Union’s good reputation and nude pictures. Boris Mikhailov officially complied with those rules, albeit in a subtly critical way, except for the nude pictures. From the late sixties, Mikhailov has developed a long list of thematically organized series. […] For his first show at Deweer gallery, Boris Mikhailov’s aim has been to make a statement instead of an overview of his 40 years of practice. In view of the economically turbulent times the world is going through at the moment, Mikhailov wanted to show how he responded to the crisis that ravaged his country in the beginning of the nineties, just after the fall of the Berlin wall. That is why he chose to show only the series ‘At Dusk’ (1993) and ‘Case History’ (1997-1998). […] Info: tel +32 (0)56 644893 fax +32 (0)56 647685 e-mail: info@deweerartgallery.com - www.deweerartgallery.com